24 Nov

/ by Bassam

It’s a pivotal week here at the studio, so I thought I’d blog a bit of progress update.
We’ve got the team split up currently in two camps: Lee and Toni are working towards a final scene: Lee’s been modelling for a week, but now he’s started doing some kickass animation- I think he’d been in withdrawal for a while, while Toni has been re-writing his super-cool wire fu script with even more functionality, render-farm immunity and efficiency in mind. Expect some crazy scripted animation, in addition to the character work :)

The rest of us have been working on the second animatic version of the movie, though Matt has moved from animatic work to join Lee with ‘real’ production as of yesterday.

We’ve been going through a continuous process of improving the script and story. After the viewing of the first animatic, we decided to cut some shots and dialog, and rework some scenes for more impact. It was a painful decision because the scenes were very good, but we hope that the complete movie will work better without them. Today we’ve got a full shot per shot breakdown of the entire movie. This is something that had eluded us so far (we seemed cursed with a “mystery scene” which no-one could gift with visuals)- And the animatic is one day away from complete- we need it for our own and our producer’s (AKA Ton) approval, as well as for the composer and actors. Here are a few scenes from the animatic:

We were harrassed by some strange men in medieval costume and painted faces on our way to work one morning…. At least one of them gave us peppernotten, though ;)

20to30 said on 24 Nov, 2005:

I have noticed characters’ rather suspecious look from the first movie U’ve published, and Im afraid I dont see changes for good. I know it is just animatic, but I can still see rather good background modelling as opposed to european(in the bad sense) look of those two characters. Do not mix terms “beauty” and “ugly”, it will result in “ugly” anyway.

hehe, these are neither the characters nor the backgrounds from the movie.. just proxies..
the real characters look a bit cuter- but in truth, they’re not what you would call “handsome guys”, at least, not as much as we are.
also if you judge from the teaser, note that the characters in that have no textures, are rigged with temporary rigs, and have no hair, and no final animation. We really hope to make them look better in the final, but it is something that will take a lot of effort- it’s not a stylistic decision, just more work to make a convincing character than an acceptable background.

Hi Omar, we still haven’t gotten it figured out quite yet what we need and how to manage it.. but we will, and we’ll post it on this website once we do.
Thanks a ton to you and everyone else for the support :D